The present invention generally concerns the display of information in a sales area.
The display of information relating to items presented for sale in a sales area is generally done by means of labels, particularly displaying the price of the item with which a label is associated, as well as other information such as the price per weight etc.
The need to possess an updated display of information has been the reason for the installation in many sales areas of electronic shelf labels, wherein the display of information on a screen of these electronic shelf labels is remote-controlled.
The usefulness of such systems is basically that they allow, in the shelves of a site such as a supermarket, hypermarket or any other sales area, the presentation to the consumer, for each item offered for sale, of a price reliably corresponding to the price as it features in the central file of the site, i.e. to the price as will be effectively used for the payment of the item.
Another advantage of these known systems is that they enable automated price changes to be made in much shorter times than with a manual display, whether it is for particular promotional periods on the site, for all or part of the items offered for sale, as an effect of pricing changes, to respond to situations of inflation in which prices must be increased very frequently etc.
Moreover, in matters of price displays there are many restrictions, particularly legal ones, as to the nature of the prices displayed (unit price, promotional price etc.) that must be observed by the electronic systems in the same way as paper displays.
Thus, electronic shelf label systems, although becoming more and more sophisticated over time, still remain relatively rigid as to the various display options, and as to the organization of these various options in time and space.
Furthermore, these electronic shelf labels only allow the display of information relating to the item with which each one of them is associated, and what is more, of information generally limited to the prices displayed by the labels.
The emergence of electronic commerce has accustomed the consumer to information that is detailed and/or specifically intended for the consumer. However, the display of this information currently practiced in sales areas is of necessity limited and does not offer any interaction with the consumer to which these items are offered for purchase.
Alternative information systems have been developed to palliate these problems, and in particular to make detailed information about a product selectively accessible to a consumer. However, these solutions are usually only applicable to a distribution store chain to which they are dedicated, or even to a single particular sales area.
For example, the patent application WO2006/035315 A1 presents a method wherein a terminal reads a piece of information on a radio-frequency chip, and calls an application of the terminal on the basis of the information read. The terminal application defines the type of product information which will be provided to the terminal. The terminal application decodes the piece of information and initiates a communication with a server to retrieve a URL representing the site of the data to be provided.
For this method however, the terminal must possess, internally, all the data allowing it to decode the information of the radio-frequency chip. It is therefore necessary for the application of the terminal to possess a database covering all the radio-frequency chips liable to be encountered, and for this database to be up-to-date. In practice, the requirements regarding the terminal are such that it can only be intended for professional uses, and not for simple customers of a sales area using a personal terminal. Moreover, the choice of the terminal application is made on the basis of the piece of information read. This read piece of information must thus be standardized to allow choice of the application, which complicates the management of the information contained in the radio-frequency chip.
The patent application US 2007/0016479 describes a method for obtaining information about a product from an identifier contained in an RFID tag. After acquisition of the identifier, the terminal sends a first request to a server which redirects the request to a directory, and in response the server receives the address of the corresponding page, then accesses the desired page via the server.
However, this method only allows access to a remote resource, and does not make it possible to select the launching of an application linked to a particular store chain. Thus, there may be an operation by the user may be required when several resources are available, for example via selection from a menu, which complicates the task of the user.
The methods of the prior art are thus not adapted to use by a customer of a sales area. This is because they require a priori knowledge of the context allowing the information to be retrieved, and thus prior configuration, which is possible for a professional use such as inventories, but is not desirable for a customer. In particular, the known methods are adapted to a particular environment, i.e. one specific to a store chain, but cannot be implemented independently from the store chain of the sales area. Moreover, the data of a store chain are in general only accessible by an application dedicated to said store chain. As a consequence, it is not possible to use the methods of the prior art in different stores.
Due to this fact, when a customer acquires a piece of information from a radio-frequency peripheral, there is no indication of the sales area in which he/she is found in the absence of prior configuration. It is thus only possible to retrieve the final data by involving the customer, for example by launching beforehand the application dedicated to the store chain of the sales area in which he/she is found, or else by choosing the store chain via a menu. There is therefore a need for a method that allows the customer to obtain the desired data without any operation on their part other than the reading of a radio-frequency device.